From the florilegium: Conrad.

I had started to put book darts in my Glass Bead Game when I abruptly ran out. Where were the rest? A search reveals them still tucked into my edition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which reminded me of the whole peck of quotations I'd never gotten around to copying down. These are they.

Marlowe chats to his friends in terms that remind me very much of my relationship to my boon companion, as was, Heldenberg―

I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of Indian ocean, Pacific, China seas―a regular dose of the East―six years or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilize you.

Near the close of my graduate studies he had begun to refer to me as "hopelessly itinerant"―let me tell you, nobody likes to find himself standing on a doorstep with an Israeli duffel bag on one shoulder and the carefully concealed irritation of his friends at the threshold in front of him.

Conrad has an ear for satire. About his early attempts to get a position that will take him into Africa, he complains that

The men said 'My dear fellow,' and did nothing.

In these straits he throws himself on the ministrations of the women―much to his chagrin―and soon finds himself en route to Brussels to present himself to his new employer:

In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre. Prejudice no doubt.

Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam delendam esse. Speaking of wise cynicism in the face of modernity, Marlowe jokes about his interview with the company doctor that

I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

I watched Berg's Wozzeck recently―as of this writing it's available on Youtube in a fairly nice video production, much to my delight―and am reminded of the doctor in that work as well, also a specimen of that particularly ugly 20th century literary trope, the vile man of reason. Doesn't Alex Ross say that Berg was working out some of his frustrations with Schoenberg in that character? Well, I digress. Do I need to introduce the following? The spooky majesty of Conrad ventriloquizing Marlowe ventriloquizing Kurtz stands on its own. We've all read this before, anyway, so reread, if you like; and if not not.

You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying 'My Intended.' You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes, but this―ah―specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball―an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and―lo!―he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. [...] You should have heard him say, 'My ivory.' Oh yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my―' everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him―but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible―it was not good for one either―trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat among the devils of the land―I mean literally. You can't understand. how could you?―with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you on or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policemand, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums―how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude―utter solitude without a policeman―by way of silence―utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion?

It is magnificence. More, and famously:

All Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his―let us say―nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which―as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times―were offered up to him―do you understand?―to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appeal to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings―we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence―of words―of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'

Retyping this tonight I'm struck by the virtuoso satire of which Conrad was capable and the calculating, even manipulative intelligence hiding beneath his naturalism―it makes me want to fast-forward past the rending of the temple veil, to one of the Faulkner novels I've been saving for the event of intestinal fortitude. Well, hope springs eternal. Meanwhile, Conrad on Marlowe on a particular kind of character type we've been seeing since the dark ages, if not before, perhaps seen critically for the first time:

The glamor of youth enveloped his particolored rags, his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months―for years―his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration―like envy. Glamor urged him on, glamor kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with the maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth.

Marlowe is wiser than I am, and as such in his case it's only something like envy, whereas I'm drinking my dissatisfaction neat. Do we have the strength for more concentrated Kurtz? Of course not. Yet:

And, don't you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head―though I had a very lively sense of that danger, too―but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke him―himself―in his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! He had kicked the very earth to pieces. he was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.

And more. Is this about our century? Was this prophecy?

"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! it rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now―images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas―these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mold of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinctions, of all the appearances of success and power.

This could have been written in 1949. One last, here in the mouth of Kurtz' Intended:

"Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?" she was saying. "He drew men towards him by what was best in them."

I am reminded of Heldenberg.

"The same sort of song."

I spent several days laboring over a half-formed essay about a footnote in Gibbon accusing Pope of "improving on Homer's theology" in Iliad 15. Several pages of block quotes in two languages later I decided that my earthshattering exegesis―that Pope's Jove is omnipotent and Homer's is just more potent―couldn't justify the labor, space and mouth noise. If I'm bored with a topic I can only assume that you would be, too. So, for lack of an intelligent thought, something that made me smile instead:

"Horace was one of the least self-deceptive of writers and like many expert craftsmen and artists he found it progressively harder to satisfy his own animum censoris honesti. He had worked his vein very thoroughly and even the most undemanding reader cannot deny that there is a grain of uncomfortable truth in the schoolboy's complaint that 'Horace always seems to be singing the same sort of song to the same sort of tune'." A. T. von S. Bradshaw, 1970. "Horace, Odes 4.1." CQ 20: 142-53. (142)

In any event, all this futility with Pope's pretty poem led me to some material worth sharing: have a look at the labors of a certain Jim Manis of Penn State, an e~lexandrine (forgive me) copious library of PDFs, certainly a κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί for those of us melting our hearts in the blogosphere of the muses. I also ran into this micro-compendium of Greek aphorisms, perhaps worth a look on a rainy day.

Oh,―apropos of nothing―I had been joking lately about Gilgamesh in terms that reminded me of this interesting video, in which a pair of very earnest PBS types play with a reconstructed mesopotamian lyre to the tune of a recitation from tablet 10; you may enjoy it too.

Negative theology.

"Do you believe in G-d?"

I was recently excoriated, as sometimes happens, for describing myself as religious―how could I have fallen into such self-involved mysticism? How could this have happened? Indignation vied with contempt for a few minutes before the subject, and conversation, were dropped. (Unclean, unclean! A whole generation of my peers has codified its very own secular leshon hara.)

The new atheism just isn't designed for confrontation with religious intellectuals. It asks the wrong questions, it's too confined by its own discourse to engage the sacred in meaningful terms; its enthusiasts just aren't equipped―as far as I've experienced―with the literary or contemplative background to approach people like myself, sitting on top of my column here in the dregs of time.

Still, though, the argument put me to thinking about that great conversation-at-midnight question of our century―I wonder how many people would find it strange, if they really thought about it? I mean the question itself as well as its strange relationship to history. Think of it―it began very objectively, almost empirically: "Why did Sarah laugh?" It was a question of power, an old transitional monotheism of the omnipotent struggling to define itself against the warring dominions of heathen cult. I think it's very easy to lose the revolutionary force of Bereshit 18:14 in the smallness of Abraham's concerns: for some time now I've been searching out the point at which G-d first reveals himself to Abraham as more than a personal divinity, and though I don't think this the point at which our ancestor realizes that he must be more than a henotheist―if that ever comes; it may not come at all until Moses―I think HaShem might be intimating exactly that, just in passing, an offhand remark that Abraham accepts in silent perplexity. After all, his god is striding off to destroy a city; under the circumstances you can't judge him too severely for being distracted from novel theological questions. So it begins as something quite different, a question of confidence rather than faith in the 20th century sense: the Jahwist author wonders whether we're confident in this alien presence and his mightiness.

Then of course it changes dramatically: now we have the missionary question put to half-reconstructed pagans, "do you believe in my god, all three of him, though you didn't before?" You hope this is closer to Elijah and his barrels of water than to another misguided species of henotheism―"your gods exist, but they're demons; only this god is omnipotent"―but this is wishful thinking, isn't it? Europe was littered with idols in everything but name until the Reformation.

But now Christianity had covered Europe like a settling snow; we entered an age of religious monoculture, of heterodoxy and heretics in a land where everyone takes the same god as a given stretching onward toward apocalypse. The 20th century question of faith would have been meaningless to these peasants and potentates: the question was never existential but doctrinal, and accusations of atheism were more than a little disingenuous.

Suddenly it occurred to mankind that there might not be a god at all. The rest is a long history of widespread banalities and the secluded palace of the mandarins: we acquired the Enlightenment, and when Gibbon writes of pagan antiquity that

the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful (ch. 2, p. 22),

I wonder if he isn't speaking rather more of his own age than Trajan's. But yes, by the philosophers indeed: don't think I'm sneering at them. Their tendency was toward the Stoics' almost-monotheism or else the rigorous materialism of their rivals; if you put theology in the hands of intellectuals it almost always seems to tend one way or the other. Small, wonder, though―Kohelet is right; of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness of the flesh. Over and over again we pile book on top of book in our scramble toward G-d, turn back, see that we've built a ziggurat, and privately despair.

Or at least I do.

But now we've come to the 21st century where the question has become well and truly existential, very much like asking whether someone believes there's life on other planets. I look back over the different ways we've asked that unusual question―first exultant, next suspiciously, then as an inquisitor, finally with caliper in hand―and I wonder whether you can really ask that question of a monotheist, or as a monotheist.

Is it meaningful to ask whether you, such as you are, acknowledge the existence of―can we even call him a being? better to resort to a naked relative pronoun―that which cannot be described except in negative terms, which is so different from us on an ontological level that to use the verb "exists" is to abuse the language? Omnipotence and omnibenevolence: what is all this in the face of a god without qualities? Omniscience and simplicity: these I understand. But you can't wash good or action clean of their human context, or at least clean enough to really apply them to our one G-d; and omnipresence is beyond my ability to question. Perhaps it's a misuse of language, perhaps not―at this instant, at least, I simply don't know.

My negative theology:

I am afraid that I will solve these problems with either mysticism―with a theology of sentiment―or resignation.

I am afraid to find G-d in the logos because this is a philosopher's heresy, a bounding of the incommensurate, idolatry in iconoclasm.

I am unable to believe in the literal truth of scripture because it manifestly isn't, but suspicious of the double-mindedness by which I hold it to be true without being truth: that 20th century willingness to discard the exclusion of the middle makes me queasy.

I am suspicious that I can formulate the thought the study of religion is the study of literature, but the reverse is not true: inevitably the disjunction will fall away; I'll conflate the books I love with the G-d my soul cries out to worship.

There is a god; he is one; and from this nothing follows. The use of language unravels into nonsense; reason is inadequate but feeling is idolatry. Every form of belief is idolatry. But this can't be true―οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος. My spouse accused me of "sublimated, postmodern Judaism" the other day―well, what else can I possibly have? Where can I go from here? I am totally unequipped to wrestle with the angel.

I mentioned Stylite saints in passing and this led me to Tennyson's "St. Simeon Stylites," which you can find here along with a very engaging and humane critical essay by USC's J. R. Kincaid as well as the arresting photograph included above, which I found unattributed on a blog unworthy of mention: I wonder what it is? A reenactment? A 19th century emulator? Very mysterious.

A footnote, with comparandum.

As I think will soon become very irritatingly apparent, I've picked up Gibbon's (divine, says Noel Coward) Decline and Fall after two years of enduring its silent recriminations from my bookshelf. A footnote to his description of Roman siege weaponry ("military engines ... all of which, either in an oblique or horizontal manner, discharged stones and darts with irresistible violence" [!]) caught my eye and reminded me of Minivier Cheevy, whom we all know:

Minivier cursed the commonplace
      And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
      Of iron clothing. (21-24)

The charming annotation in question comes on page 12 of my edition (Heritage 1946), practically meaningless to you since display editions of this work are promulgated with the same metastatic commercial glee as are Gray's Anatomy and Paradise Lost. Woe to display editions and their fate, laudandis, ornandis, tollendisque! In any event, it's footnote 16:

The subject of the ancient machines is treated with great knowledge and ingenuity by the Chevalier Folard. He prefers them in many respects to our modern cannon and mortars. We may observe that the use of them in the field gradually became more prevalent, in proportion as personal valour and military skill declined with the Roman empire. When men were no longer found, their place was supplied by machines. (Emphasis mine.)

In any event, G-d grant Cheevy his iron clothing and Folard his engines with their oblique (or horizontal!) discharge.

A meditation.

Over at City Journal, Claire Berlinski is giving herself a sprain proclaiming in the wilderness about secrets squirreled out of Soviet archives and now freely available to the media, if only anyone gave a damn. Lamentable that she's wasting her breath.

I don't think there's real hope of turning back the steady slouch of things to that earlier politics of the manichee. Yes, it served us well until Vietnam and the New Left—or served, at least; there was a mechanism in place, and though it gave us the House Committee on Un-American Activities it also gave us moral purpose, that supreme fiction so dangerous and ennobling. (But we are deadly afraid of moral purpose; after all, the fascists had moral purpose, and the fascists still have their boot on 20th century thought—we're like those damaged twentysomethings who were harassed as children and now can think of nothing else.)

But of course it's only dangerous, not ennobling—well, at least that's where my mind goes with it, inevitably, but who knows? I grew up in a university.

Athens: not really democratic. (Corollary—Persia: not really so bad!)
Augustus: autocrat. (Maecenas: toady. Vergil: deeply morbid.)
Marcus Aurelius: platitudinous.
Crusades: brutal & unnecessary & genocidal.
Oliver Cromwell: autocrat.
Pilgrims: vicious & genocidal.
Settlers: genocidal.
The Raj: venal & brutal & racist.
Old Dominion: venal & racist & vicious & brutal & unnecessary but not genocidal.
Cold war: propaganda scheme (plus red scare).
President Bush: buffoonish & venal & racist.

Fine, you win, you win. I can't think at this point of a broad moral impetus that didn't go terribly wrong, at least if it wasn't disingenuous to begin with. My heroism, O sages and hierophants, is well broken. Mazal tov. But I don't believe you.

Crying out for the mos maiorum, that ever-receding Good Old Way—it's never really a puritanical exercise, I don't think. I don't buy into the very popular narrative of the power-hungry hypocrite, that famous and imaginary would-be tyrant with his fingers in other people's pastry (from theatrical to reproductive)—anything that easy and that convenient must be false. Reality is dense, and human beings are the densest part of it, swept around like seaweed in the wash of their own logos. After all, the mos maiorum recedes in front of you like Aeneas' Italy, nightmarishly further away the faster you chase it; go back in time and your reverend father's world is crumbling, too, and his father's father's. When a flippant person discovers this truth for himself he'll inevitably snigger about how, ah, clearly it's a question of disposition, or a kind of power-play, or just open delusion, or revanchist moaning: I've heard that enough times, G-d knows it.

But he's right in a sense—it is a question of disposition, but not in his terms. Conservatism, political and cultural, begins in human loneliness. It's not a question of forcing other people into virtue, or really even trying to slow a real civilizational decline; it's the terrible realization that other men are not like you, that your concerns are different, that you are wherever your thoughts are and that is very far indeed from the soul sitting next to you in the lecture hall—no, decline isn't a falling-away from an old gold standard but a declension from yourself, from the fragment of the mind of G-d you hope is in your breast, nominative to vocative: me, of me, apart from me, to me, Ah, O other, o hysterical man.

It's a longing for human companionship, for the impossible Zion of sharing your mind—really sharing it, sacred heart's longing finding answer—with your brothers. Conservatism is the agonized cry for that lost city of G-d where your worldview is not at issue, never part from your fellow man in the knowledge that no amount of argument could bridge the impossible gulf between you—for the city where no man goes out into the world alone.

But all this is true of the progressive mindset, too, only with different aims, different anxieties. The loneliness is the same, and so is the echo-chamber comfort of ideological purity. Think of the repulsiveness of commentators on Jihad Watch with their frog-chorus of agreement: you want that impossible unison with such an agony of wanting that you turn to vicious extremity and the party line, to a deranged ideological monomania that drives all things out of mind. Or think of greenpeace protesters, or raw foodists, or any other fragment of our ruined civilization—fellowship at the cost of penury, inertness, grimace. (But not ruined, I have to remind myself: Always the same, always the old balance, always the same mess. This is the truth, but I don't believe it. Yet, I mutter like Galileo, it declines.)

For a moment in American history we were confronted with such an unimaginable evil that it was possible to form a broad cultural coalition—and of course people were ruined by it, Jews, homosexuals, the innocent idealists of the left who didn't know any better because they loved the Idea and as such sinned in ignorance. But you can't go back, at least not now: no amount of journalism will save it, much to our dismay; the dog won't hunt, brother.

Down into the yellow-peeling onionskin of the dregs of time.

No, at heart we curmudgeons and antiquarians and other misplaced dreamers are waiting for Saul to die in his sin and the coming coronation our David, that cultural climax more beautiful and impossible than Michelangelo could have imagined. We want to see a society, a president, a king after G-d's own heart, and yet at this point in history—this postmodern hysteria, perpetual, nerve-wracking, labyrinthine—we could never acclaim the David of our heart's hunger.

Because we can't stop thinking of the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Philistines—even Amalek.

And it drives us to derangement.